YMMV / Dear Esther

• Awesome Music: Linked.
• Epileptic Trees: By its very nature, it's designed to make you question just what is going on.
• Fridge Brilliance: Some of the inconsistencies make sense if y'all remember that memory ain't the most reliable thing and that, each time you remember, you might miss some details or remember than being different than usual.
• Faux Symbolism: Lengthy Biblical references, Arc Numbers, drawings of molecular structures on the walls of the caves. What do any of these mean? Good question.
• Genius Bonus: The images on the walls and bluffs. Some of the chemical formulae are ethyl alcohol and dopamine and at least one of the electrical diagrams is for anti-lock brakes. The writing on the walls is a reference to the biblical story of Paul's journey to (and conversion at) Damascus.
  • There's also a golden spiral on the beach, a representation of the Fibonacci Sequence. Its significance is more or less unexplained.
  • Some of the drawings resemble sensory neurons.
  • As Jessica Curry explains during the director's commentary, the rhythm of the music that plays at the start of the last chapter when you emerge from the caves is Morse code that repeatedly spells out "Esther".
• Genre Turning Point: Dear Esther was one of the first so-called "walking simulators" to come out and get real traction as a critical and commercial success, and at the time was one of the games that gamers pointed to in the "are games art?" arguments of the late 2000's. Fast forward to now, and this game, and others with similar presentation, are looked upon with much less universal praise, if not outright scorn.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Some argue that the game's linearity and non-difficulty makes it too easy to the point where some feel it can't even qualify as a game.
• Nightmare Fuel: In an intellectual way - not so much visceral. Aside from the narrator describing in vivid detail his broken, gangrenous leg, of course.
  • The detailed and entirely first person cutscene of the narrator climbing the island's radio mast then throwing himself from it. Though just before he hits the floor, it turns into a sort of Heartwarming Moment.
  • The ghosts◊ that don't do anything but observe you from a distance.
• Sacred Cow: Fans can be excessively defensive, and critics can be excessively vicious.
• Special Effects Failure: One notable standout moment; when you find the armada of paper boats the narrator had made from his letters and set adrift on the ocean, many of them are sitting completely motionless on the water rather than bobbing up and down or drifting around, made worse by the fact that some of them are bobbing subtly up and down.
• Tear Jerker: Despite the narrator's weird, poetic way of speaking and possible unreliability, you'll probably end up feeling sympathy for either him or one of the characters he mentions.
  "I collected all the letters I'd ever meant to send to you, if I'd have ever made it to the mainland but had instead collected at the bottom of my rucksack, and I spread them out along the lost beach. Then I took each and every one and I folded them into boats. I folded you into the creases and then, as the sun was setting, I set the fleet to sail. Shattered into twenty-one pieces, I consigned you to the Atlantic, and I sat here until I'd watched all of you sink."
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The island and the caves are quite shiny, despite the age of the mod's Source Engine.
  • The 2012 retail remake takes this up to eleven.

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